It’s the weekend and our diva, with boarding pass in hand, deftly navigates the airport gates like she’s done many times before. Well…yes…she has done this a hundred times, this hopping on a thirty-minute interisland flight to some exotic outer island to direct some concert by some big-name talent, but not…not recently. Not since her daughter was born, and surely not since a few years before that. Heck — not since they eliminated the smoking section at the backs of aircraft.
She is aviophobic. Yep. She is really lousy company on an airplane.
Oh, don’t worry, she doesn’t get airsick. Feh. But she does notice that they no longer stock airsickness bags in every seat pocket.
She also notices that the inflight safety briefings have radically changed. No one demonstrates the use of a personal floatation device. Instead, they urge her to listen to the instructional audio tape playing in the otherwise noisy-as-heck cabin, and they suggest she read the instructions on the card in the seat pocket in front of her. Our diva is ambivalent, for if her transportation apparatus, made up of several hundred tons of metal and gasoline, suddenly falls from the sky toward the wide and turbulent Pacific Ocean, she’s going to be fixing her lipstick, not manually inflating her life vest by blowing into some rubber tubing.
Xanax’d to the hilt, with pulse racing at 120 beats per minute, she steps across the threshhold into the Boeing 737-700. It’s a short flight, she tells herself, and they’ve never had a crash. A couple of close calls, perhaps. Aloha Airlines has one of the best safety records on earth, with pilots who can do things like save an entire planeload of passengers when the top of the craft opens up like a can of sardines at 24,000 feet or suddenly loses cabin pressure. Aloha Airlines is the shiz.
The flight from Honolulu to Kona is beautiful. Minimal turbulence, no banking to speak of, no weird sounds or actions in the cockpit. The Xanax is working. The plane is working. Our diva is elated when she touches down perfectly at Kona International Airport.
The concert goes off with minimal hitches, and in some wee hour of the morning she is escorted to her hotel while the remainder of her staff braves zero sleep to get the show packed up and headed to Maui.
The next day, however, is a different story.
After dropping aforesaid sleepless staff off at the airport, she cruises the length and breadth of the Waikoloa area looking for a potential new venue, loses a credit card after filling the rental van up with gas, and arrives at the airport for the flight to Honolulu. The band is on that same flight, waiting in the VIP lounge. She’s satisfied that everyone is in good spirits and has a word with the lead singer and the manager.
The world around them is a large thunderstorm of lightning, rain, and winds. It is a statewide storm system, inundating all the islands. Kona’s airport is a series of buildings separated by large tracts of open space. Kona is the dryest area of the island chain so a thunderstorm is a true anomaly. Water sits nearly two inches deep on the runway, visibility is a scant two hundred yards, and our diva is a sopping wet mess.
She watches her plane land. It makes one of the shortest stops she has ever seen — on a dime. Other passengers in the boarding area make comments like, ”Did you see that?” “That’s the shortest landing I’ve ever seen.” “Whoa, what was that?” She chews her Xanax.
The plane then heads toward the gate and fishtails just a smidge on the slick tarmac. Fishtails. More murmurings at the gate. She glances down and wonders if there’s enough tread on the tires to achieve takeoff speed in all that water (it should be mentioned that her flight was delayed for a mechanical issue before arriving).
The band boards, the diva boards. She takes a seat at the very back of the plane, her favorite place on an interisland flight because there isn’t a first class anyway, and it’s quieter at the back of a 737-700. She chomps half of another Xanax and attempts to relax…she has just lost sight of the plane on the neighboring runway as it taxied into the thick layer of clouds on the ground. On the ground. Something about volcanic fog mixing with water particles and settling at sea level.
She has never been on a truly bad flight before, unless one counts the time she traveled to Japan through the remnants of a storm that decimated a portion of Kobe. But that was on a very large jet with huge engines and lots of torque. The 737-700 is a tiny thing. So…to put it mildly…the flight to Honolulu is a hair-raising, gut-wrenching, scream-inducing, prayer-riddled rollercoaster ride. It is the longest thirty minutes, and the absolutely worst experience (outside of childbirth), of her life.
The nicest thing about touching down at Honolulu International Airport is that the Xanax finally kicks in.
